How do I define political poetry is a double consciousness question for me. First I examine the powers of poetry as a polemic tool and then I turn it to a specific time in the poet’s concern to analyze the situation in context of the poem itself. I am made to think of political poetry having the potential to be a propaganda vehicle toward a certain message and so I am careful in examining the causes. Not all propaganda is “bad” per se. We can think of many justice poems, or violent reactionary poems, or oppositional poems that do not offer an alternative solution; instead, they just oppose. I keep thinking of African American poets of the Black Arts Movement and I cannot find a better explanation of the necessary measures taken by those artists to set propaganda criteria to promote artistic expression in the spirit of a revolution. When artists begin to see art as polemic then other people see it the same way.
We had the argument in class about the political/social/economic/racial position of EBB and the ways in which she creates a voice in her poetry that had been judged as unauthentic, which to me appears to be a cowardly excuse to judge an artist, especially when they bring to light political issues that no one else is going/wants to discuss.
I cannot help to think here of many who oppose wars (my self one of them, since I think we have mastered the age of reason so we don’t need to fight for ideological reasons any more-while people can, and do, die for more important things, like their lives) might have to rethink their stand. Sometimes when powers take a non-involved position people suffer. I’m specifically thinking of two necessary wars. One, the American civil war, that in my opinion came too late…ending slavery was one of the causes but most importantly, in brought this country to the modern times without any preparation. From slavery to modernism-what a disaster! I might get back to that some other time. The other, is the war against the Ottoman Empire. Not one single country could organize enough with others to un-friend them and end the tyranny of slavery all over Europe. When the Russians came south to help, they were negotiated to return, and so they did. Things of course did not happen the way I’m explaining them. They actually happened in a million other ways, depending on who is telling the story. And so my answer is that war and personal political preferences, either economic or ideological, always play apart.
EBB in “The Greek Slave” judges the art as unauthentic, not because it is not beautiful, but because it has not captured the agony of the slave. In indirect ways she compares her poetry to that of the sculpture and knows that her poetry can make justice to the slaves as well as to the statue by pointing out its lack of honesty.
“They say Ideal beauty cannot enter
The house of anguish. On the threshold stands
An alien Image with enshackled hands
It is alien because it is not authentic and if we compare it to her poem, “the Runway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point” when she says, “wrong followed by a deeper wrong!” The idea of Pilgrims having been in the same place of slavery and murder, the only thing she does not bring up in her poem is a sense of freedom the Pilgrims sought, but its absence is the gap between that and slavery. The lack of promise of freedom untold results in slavery. Here EBB plays with the powers of language and art and the political power invested in both.
How do I define political poetry is a double consciousness question for me. First I examine the powers of poetry as a polemic tool and then I turn it to a specific time in the poet’s concern to analyze the situation in context of the poem itself. I am made to think of political poetry having the potential to be a propaganda vehicle toward a certain message and so I am careful in examining the causes. Not all propaganda is “bad” per se. We can think of many justice poems, or violent reactionary poems, or oppositional poems that do not offer an alternative solution; instead, they just oppose. I keep thinking of African American poets of the Black Arts Movement and I cannot find a better explanation of the necessary measures taken by those artists to set propaganda criteria to promote artistic expression in the spirit of a revolution. When artists begin to see art as polemic then other people see it the same way.
We had the argument in class about the political/social/economic/racial position of EBB and the ways in which she creates a voice in her poetry that had been judged as unauthentic, which to me appears to be a cowardly excuse to judge an artist, especially when they bring to light political issues that no one else is going/wants to discuss.
I cannot help to think here of many who oppose wars (my self one of them, since I think we have mastered the age of reason so we don’t need to fight for ideological reasons any more-while people can, and do, die for more important things, like their lives) might have to rethink their stand. Sometimes when powers take a non-involved position people suffer. I’m specifically thinking of two necessary wars. One, the American civil war, that in my opinion came too late…ending slavery was one of the causes but most importantly, in brought this country to the modern times without any preparation. From slavery to modernism-what a disaster! I might get back to that some other time. The other, is the war against the Ottoman Empire. Not one single country could organize enough with others to un-friend them and end the tyranny of slavery all over Europe. When the Russians came south to help, they were negotiated to return, and so they did. Things of course did not happen the way I’m explaining them. They actually happened in a million other ways, depending on who is telling the story. And so my answer is that war and personal political preferences, either economic or ideological, always play apart.
EBB in “The Greek Slave” judges the art as unauthentic, not because it is not beautiful, but because it has not captured the agony of the slave. In indirect ways she compares her poetry to that of the sculpture and knows that her poetry can make justice to the slaves as well as to the statue by pointing out its lack of honesty.
“They say Ideal beauty cannot enter
The house of anguish. On the threshold stands
An alien Image with enshackled hands
It is alien because it is not authentic and if we compare it to her poem, “the Runway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point” when she says, “wrong followed by a deeper wrong!” The idea of Pilgrims having been in the same place of slavery and murder, the only thing she does not bring up in her poem is a sense of freedom the Pilgrims sought, but its absence is the gap between that and slavery. The lack of promise of freedom untold results in slavery. Here EBB plays with the powers of language and art and the political power invested in both.